“Laughing Matters in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee”

Abstract

“Laughing Matters” because laughing is important, vital, and necessary to our lives and the world in which we live; it is serious and difficult, often painful to create and to sustain. Beckettian laughter is physical humor, emanating from the laughable materiality of the human body, its physiology, fragility, and ultimate decay, so often a locus for humor, and described so ribaldly in Becket’s fiction. The essay also inclues a section describing the way in which Albee elicits laughter in his plays, which tends to be language-based rather than physical humor.

Keywords

• laughter
• humor
• language
• skeptical nominalism
• performance
• vaudeville